Organising and storing photos. Advice please!

[Bennie Boy]

Like most people nowadays I have thousands of photos. They are currently stored either on my iphone or on a fairly old PC.

I'm interested to know what options I have to sort and store my photos. I will probably getting rid of my old PC so I have to do something.

I'm thinking of getting software that will sort through my photos, removing duplicates and then storing them probably on icloud.

Has anyone done anything similar?

Thanks in advance,

Ben

 

[DJDave87]

Ive just downloaded Amazon Photos app to get the free £7. Further details below.

£7 Free Amazon Credit (Selected Accounts) when you back up your photos with Amazon Photos for Amazon Prime - hotukdeals

If you’ve got Amazon Prime, simply click the link, download the photo app and get a £7 Amazon credit. You'll receive your credit within seven days.Get a £7 Amaz

www.hotukdeals.com

Looks like it could be pretty handy but not checked it out properly yet. I imagine long term either limits on the storage amount or a tiered costing might be brought in. Either that or its designed to make cancelling prime more and more difficult to do.

I wouldnt put it all on cloud so would either regularly back up to local storage or back up to cloud from local storage.

 

[Bennie Boy]

Thanks for the heads up!

 

[snerkler]

I've just sorted all mine manually into folders for specific years then specific 'events' and backed up onto two external drives.

 

[BT Bob]

I wouldn't trust all my photos to one method.
Currently, I have them all stored on an external HDD, and the very important ones (I used to shoot weddings, so have loads of them) on DVD-R discs, which are duplicated and the guy who was my partner shooting them has the copies (and I have his copies).
I addition I have them on Google Drive.
I've looked at a number of cloud storage options for all my data backup, but yet to find something suitable (and suitably priced).

 

[wongataa]

Organisation is best done with DAM (digital asset management) software.

I use the management tools in Adobe Lightroom Classic as that is also my main photo editor. There are DAM tools that are not tied to any photo editor if that is they way you prefer.

What you need to do first is decide on a filing system. I use year folders (2021, 2020, etc) and dated sub folders in those year folders. A photo taken on Feb 3rd 2010 would be in a folder whose path is as follows: \Photos\2021\2021-02-03\

If you use the date format yyyy-mm-dd files/folders automatically sort in date order.

Once you have copied all the photos into one location in your preferred folder system then further organisation is done in the DAM software. Give the photos keywords. It will take time doing it from scratch but if you do a few at a time you will eventually build up a nice keyword list and have everything with at least some basic keywords. I tend only give photos I actually edit more comprehensive keywords.

Now you can easily find photos by using keyword searches and and use other ways of cataloguing based on photo metadata and you don't have to root through lots of folders finding things.

Make sure everything is backed up regularly. I use external hard disks for local backups and I use an online backup service - Backblaze - for backing everything up in the cloud.

 

[12harry]

Not just Photos ! - Vids and digital Art, , 3D designs...etc.
. . . . This is a topic that needs care and trust... e.g. digital photo formats can be lost as can discs and the software to read them.
I suspect HDD are about as reliable as one can reasonably expect. although the "Cloud" has technical back-up, there is no G'tee it will survive a world-wide hacking, for example.
If your HDDs are in a RAID case that "should" confer some L-T benefits.... but finding somewhere to keep this unit could be problematic . Obviously: away from excess heat, lightning, flood, theft. fire. etc. but these are v.difficult to overcome - - - as is failure of the RAID motherboard in the casing. This might suggest two Raid set-ups using different Manufacturers. . . . so their MTBF are totally skewed.
Searching for the necessary photo is quite separate, IMHO - but any software (or Cloud)solution has L-T risks - and significant Cost, in perpetuity. .... as does checking your RAID boxes.

Good Luck - Keep us informed...

 

[rpr]

I save my photos to two seperate NAS drives

 

[newbie1]

@Bennie Boy lots of good options already in the thread. Essentially on your own disk or nas, or a cloud option.

Storing is maybe the easiest step, it's the sorting and organizing to find what you need that is difficult if you haven't been doing that as you have gone along. I found this list of tools that I'm going to check out as I have a similar problem Best Photo Management Software 2021: Digital Picture Image Organizer

However I expect I'll take the same route as @snerkler and do it manually not sure I trust the algorithms.